News tagged with cockpit

Professor David Stupples, City's Professor of Electronic and Radio Systems, says the time has come for the flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit data recorder (CDR) - the black box found on aircraft - to be stored in ...

When a police helicopter plunged into the Clutha pub in Glasgow city centre two years ago, killing ten, an accident investigation was launched to find out what happened and why – a process that is essential to preventing ...

Throughout aviation's comparatively brief history, properly investigating the causes of accidents has been essential to improving flight safety, to the point that aviation is one of the safest ways to travel. Looking at the ...

Customers expect products to be tailored to their needs. And not only that: they want to influence the way the product is manufactured as well. As a result, very flexible manufacturing and administrative processes are necessary. ...

As evidence mounts that Germanwings flight 4U9525 was crashed deliberately by its co-pilot who locked the flight's captain out of the cockpit, there have been renewed calls to enforce a "two-person rule", where two members ...

Nicholas Kasdaglis, a Ph.D. student and research assistant in the Human-Centered Design Institute at Florida Institute of Technology, has been awarded use of cutting-edge design software that may allow him to better understand ...

The first comprehensive report into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 revealed Sunday that the battery of the locator beacon for the plane's data recorder had expired more than a year before the jet vanished ...

Located in the northwest corner of Greenland, Leidy Glacier is fed by ice from the Academy Glacier (upstream and inland). As Leidy approaches the sea, it is diverted around the tip of an island that separates the Olriks Fjord ...

In the wake of recent airline crashes, major news networks have aired concerns about pilots' ability to accurately fly "by hand" when the airplane's cockpit automation systems fail. Although many of these concerns have centered ...

Cockpit

A cockpit or flight deck is the area, usually near the front of an aircraft, from which a pilot controls the aircraft. Most modern cockpits are enclosed, except on some small aircraft, and cockpits on large airliners are also physically separated from the cabin. From the cockpit an aircraft is controlled on the ground and in the air.

Cockpit as a term for the pilot's compartment in an aircraft first appeared in 1914. From about 1935 cockpit also came to be used informally to refer to the driver's seat of a car, especially a high performance one, and this is official terminology in Formula One. The term is most likely related to the sailing term for the coxswain's station in a Royal Navy ship, and later the location of the ship's rudder controls.[citation needed]

The cockpit of an aircraft contains flight instruments on an instrument panel, and the controls which enable the pilot to fly the aircraft. In most airliners, a door separates the cockpit from the passenger compartment. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, all major airlines fortified the cockpit against access by hijackers.

On an airliner, the cockpit is usually referred to as the flight deck. This term derives from its use by the RAF for the separate, upper platform where the pilot and co-pilot sat in large flying boats.